Automation revolution: Transforming the end-to-end professional printing process

Automation is advancing across industries, ushering in new efficiencies that can be applied to almost every business. For the print industry in particular – both for commercial PSPs and for in-house print departments – it represents a crucial opportunity to push the boundaries of their creative offering without compromising on timelines and budgets.

Many professional print providers find themselves under immense pressure. Budgets are stagnant or shrinking, while internal and external customers expect ever faster turnarounds for printed outputs as they try to keep up with an increasingly fast-paced world. Automation is helping print providers adapt to this new environment.

Boosting productivity and maximizing accuracy

The greatest boost to business that automation provides is through productivity and accuracy benefits. Automating the professional printing service end-to-end eliminates time-consuming manual steps throughout the process. And by removing manual steps, automation improves accuracy by limiting the chance of human error at every stage.

• Ordering: The ordering and job loading process is more precisely defined through a web-to-print solution, reducing the chance of misunderstandings and mistakes.
• Preflighting: Templates for common jobs (from flyers to booklets in standard sizes) can save operators from having to manually configure the right settings for fonts and format every time.
• Settings adjustment: New consistency-sensing solutions can pre-calibrate settings for colour quality and front-to-back registration before print, and continually adjust these settings on the fly throughout the print run to ensure the best results are maintained consistently across every sheet. This saves time on manually calibrating settings before and during printing.
• Finishing: Automatic finishing solutions can reduce the manual process of transferring prints between different finishing machines, as well as the actual finishing processes themselves – saving time and improving quality. For example, previously labour-intensive tasks such as punching pages offline can now be automated with in-line wire spool solutions.
• Quality and consistency checks: Once prints are completed, scanning solutions can automate the quality control process. These monitor each page for flaws and reprint any imperfect sheets to ensure consistent quality, saving hours of manual inspection time.

Assuring Quality

Many professional print service providers will spend hours on manual checks, ensuring every sheet is free from imperfections such as streaks, stains and distortion, and that colours and front-to-back registration are consistent across the entire run. While vital for high-quality results, this process can significantly delay completion of projects, and is still open to the risk of human error – especially considering the repetitive nature of the task.

At this stage of the process, automation can be indispensable. Sensing solutions can pre-set the optimal configuration for colour and registration before printing, and then monitor each sheet during the print run, continuously adjust to maintain the best results. And automated inspection solutions can scan each sheet for flaws and imperfections, then automatically re-print any imperfect sheets where necessary.

These tools can save time for operators and improve the accuracy of checks, so professional print providers can ensure stunning, consistent quality every time.

Putting the ball in the customer’s court

The benefits of automation go far beyond increases in speed and quality. Many automated solutions can also help to improve experiences for both staff and customers.

At the initial ordering stage, for example, automated web-to-print solutions enable customers to directly upload and specify jobs through a PSP’s online print-shop. This creates a much more convenient, straightforward experience for the person making an order, which can directly impact sales.

Meanwhile, it also encourages the customer to more specifically define their request at the beginning of the process. Getting all the details upfront helps eliminate the usual back-and-forth over styles and design that is often commonplace in professional print jobs, where customers may often make quite generic requests which then need to be clarified. This saves time and frustration for you and the customer, and helps eliminate wasted materials from mistakes.

Growing the business

Web-to-print is also an important tool to help professional printers to grow their business. For example, by enabling remote ordering, it makes it easy for PSPs to reach new customers beyond their specific geographical area, dramatically expanding their pool of potential business.

For in-house print rooms, automating more complex finishing processes, such as wire spool binding or saddle stitching, can help them to produce more professional applications that might otherwise have to be outsourced because they are considered too complicated or too time consuming for their capabilities. By developing the capacity for new applications, they can then draw more budget back into the in-house print room, and in turn invest in higher-value applications. In-house print departments can even take on external work when there’s spare capacity, to generate additional revenue.

By reducing the time spent on manual tasks throughout the printing process – from transferring prints between different machines to manual finishing – staff can free up time to focus on more creative, value-add tasks.

Both PSPs and in-house printers can get more time to think more creatively about customer briefs, as well as promoting and marketing their services to grow the business.

The unpredictable future

Automation isn’t new – but its benefits have become increasingly valuable since the Covid-19 pandemic. Covid forced retail online and required businesses to either work remotely or dramatically reduce the numbers of people in physical working spaces – with significant impacts on professional printers. Fortunately, running the ordering process online removes the need for face-to-face order management with customers. And by reducing the amount of manual intervention needed at every stage of the printing process, staff can be re-deployed to more value-add tasks. Further, many of these other tasks may now be operable remotely, thanks to automation programmes that tie into cloud-based solutions.

Covid-19 is just one example of how volatile the market landscape can be for all industries. The forces affecting budgets and production timelines are constantly changing – and, as the pandemic has shown, the conditions in which print businesses and departments work can change overnight. In this environment, professional printers need to be agile, able to rapidly adjust to new changes. Automation is crucial in this respect, helping print businesses and departments to expand and adapt their capabilities quickly without extensive manual intervention or retraining.

But a holistic approach is crucial here. Piecemeal investments that automate different parts of the printing process with conflicting programmes with separate support contracts could amount to a management nightmare, making the end-to-end solution difficult to adapt and maintain – especially if anything changes or goes wrong. To get it right, it’s crucial to have access to a partner with a comprehensive portfolio of services and solutions that allows you to harness the advantages of automation throughout the entire print run.

You can always get advice and support from Canon on building end-to-end automation into your entire print process.

If you want to explore more about the automation modules, you can visit the link in below.

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